Bliss: A Novel

by O. Z. Livaneli

  But dread still clutched at his heart. It was as though he was not Professor İrfan Kurudal; it was as though someone else was living in his body. For the past few months, he had been observing himself from without.

  He had once dreamed that he was going to visit a patient in the hospital. In his dream, he had entered a sick man’s room, put the flowers in a vase, and sat down at the foot of the bed. The patient, dressed in pajamas, was sitting up in bed facing him. İrfan stared at him, and saw it was himself. He, İrfan Kurudal was visiting himself. The man sitting opposite him and having the dream was not İrfan, the patient, but İrfan, the visitor. Neither of them said a word. He stared at his pale, sick face for a long time.

  Slowly, another figure began to materialize next to the patient, and İrfan began to tremble and sweat in his dream. The form taking shape was identical to the İrfan Kurudal already in the bed. There were now two men in the bed and one sitting opposite them: three İrfan Kurudals looking at each other without speaking.

  Then the two İrfans in the bed turned their heads to the right with a slow, synchronized motion, displaying their profiles. A cold shiver went down İrfan’s spine; the two faces began to crumble. Bit by bit, the cheeks, mouths, chins, and foreheads fell away. The eyes were the last to disappear. At that moment the professor had begun to scream, but a nudge from his wife had awakened him. He had been eternally grateful to her for that.

  Aysel always slept so quietly that he could not even hear her breathing. He was the lucky one as he himself snored loudly. Some mornings, on waking and glancing at Aysel’s face, İrfan would tell himself, “Look, this is your wife. Your wife, Aysel.”

  Aysel’s nose had been operated on, but that was the only correction that had been made to her perfect face. She was the only woman among their acquaintances who had had so little cosmetic surgery. Aysel kept fit with calisthenics and bodybuilding exercises six times a week and never let herself sag. Exercise, as well as the latest diets and doses of fat-burning medicine, saved her from undergoing liposuction. And she had been lucky: A famous Brazilian surgeon, who had visited Istanbul to operate on a handful of well-known women, was the doctor who had worked on her nose. He was an expert, and she had suffered no serious problems after surgery, just a bit of discoloration and some swelling around her nose and eyes for a few weeks. Some of her not-so-fortunate friends had ended up with mangled noses, bulging lips, and breathing difficulties. The noses of a few of them had almost disappeared.

  “Look, this is your wife. Your own darling wife! There’s no reason to be afraid,” İrfan told himself.

  The daughter of a wealthy shipowner, Aysel had no need of his money. However, in recent years, the professor’s income had been rising steadily from the various paid television appearances arranged by his brother-in-law. Every week he met his friends to talk in front of the cameras, and this brought him a substantial sum each month. With more than enough to spend, he deposited the excess in the bank, and his accounts kept on growing.

  His friends who bought national treasury bonds in Turkish liras during economic crises earned a much greater amount, reaping nearly 50 percent more than by investing in dollars. Some also profited from the stock market, but İrfan steered clear of such a gamble. He was a man of learning, a teacher, not a broker, but if the bank offered high interest rates, it would be foolish to miss that opportunity.

  İrfan’s attitude toward money irritated his brother-in-law, Sedat, who often said that if he paid more attention at dinners when the conversation turned to business, he could multiply his earnings five or ten times over. The professor never listened.

  İrfan and Aysel often ate out, preferring trendy gourmet restaurants favored by fashionable Istanbul society. Some of the restaurants were not that much different from those he visited with his wife every year in New York. Lately, they had been going to Changa, a fusion restaurant with minimalist decor. Paper Moon used to be a popular spot, but the Kurudals’ circle did not frequent it much anymore, claiming it had become “too crowded and too common.” They rarely went to the Bosphorus fish restaurants, either, favoring sashimi and sushi over traditional bluefish and turbot.

  “I’m happy,” said İrfan Kurudal, as he sat alone in his bathroom. “I’m so happy,” he repeated—and began to cry.

  Books that Aysel had given him extolled the benefits of positive thinking. Far Eastern wisdom, Zen Buddhism, and Tao philosophy all preached the same message: “Let life flow like a river; think positively so that everything becomes positive; the root of all the evil in the world is to think negative thoughts.”

  After finishing high school and graduating from the Bosphorus University, Aysel had enrolled for a course in Boston. There she met İrfan, who was then a scholarship student at Harvard, and they had married shortly after. She had never worked in her life.

  İrfan and Aysel had returned home to Istanbul, capital of the bygone Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, declaring, “No city in the world is as lively as Istanbul” and proceeded to spend their time enjoying the delights of the city. The vitality of the metropolis excited them, and İrfan was fascinated by the vigor and allure of its sprawling neighborhoods. He frequently noted that it was similar to New York in this regard. Even the dismal shantytowns, home to millions of migrants from Anatolia, which had sprung up on the outskirts of Istanbul, throbbed with energy. Someone had opened a restaurant named Goodfellas in one of those poor neighborhoods, emphasizing a brutal similarity with the outlying areas of New York.

  İrfan’s brother-in-law, who worked in advertising, would often declare that a city had to have a certain number of murders in order to be a metropolis. “Istanbul hasn’t reached that stage yet,” he would say. “That’s all that’s missing.”

  Istanbul had not developed organically like other European cities. It resembled New York, since it was inhabited by people from every walk of life—rich and poor, refined and coarse. Thanks to African immigrants, Istanbul even had black residents.

  İrfan thought the city must have accumulated the energy of the entire country, and he himself was one of the most learned, most esteemed, and most successful of its inhabitants. He did not squander money like the nouveaux riches but passed his time reading, attending art exhibitions, and going to the Summer Festival concerts held in the Open-Air Theater or St. Irene—all kinds of concerts by world-famous orchestras and singers.

  He loved to wake up to the sound of Jean-Pierre Rampal’s flute, and he would start the day with a half hour swim in the pool while listening to the same music. Aysel did not care much for classical music, though she pretended to share her husband’s taste. They also followed the popular trends. An evening out at one of the city’s famous nightclubs to listen to the arabesque tunes of gay and transvestite singers provided a dash of local color. İrfan relished the feeling of being a Westerner in the Orient, and an Easterner in the Occident. He was not snobbish and did not turn up his nose at lowbrow culture.

  Last year, for fun, one of their friends had celebrated his birthday at an “oriental” club, and İrfan had been introduced to a new world. Fat gay singers in “third-gender” clothing strutted on top of the tables, encouraging everyone to climb up and join them in a belly dance. Before long most of the women were up on the tables, gyrating to the beat of the drum, while the men sat transfixed.

  Gazing at Aysel dripping with perspiration as she danced with abandon on the tabletop, İrfan ruminated over the idea that the sexual energy of his society was being discharged in a ritual purification, a kind of catharsis. Normally, most of the men around him would fight any other male who dared to look lustfully at their wives, but here they enjoyed watching their half-naked women arouse other men with their sensual dancing. As Kazantzakis, the author of Zorba, the Greek, once wrote: “In Hellas, light is sacred: In Ionia it is carnal.” The archaic notes of the darbuka, a kind of drum played with the hands, and the rhythm unique to this region put people into a state of ecstasy, arousing even the coldest and most distant to join in the mesm
erizing dance.

  “A common sense of rhythm has more significance for a nation than its flag,” thought İrfan. Not melody but rhythm—it is rhythm that distinguishes cultures.

  He had once observed his theory in action in the music department of the Virgin Megastore in New York’s Times Square, where customers put on headphones to listen to the latest CDs. Divided into areas for jazz, classical, African, Middle Eastern, pop, and rock music, the place was full of people wearing headphones all moving different parts of their bodies. Jazz lovers, slightly stooped, tapped their feet to the insistent rhythm, aficionados of Latin music wiggled their hips, while those absorbed in the music of the Middle East contorted their bellies. It was amusing to watch their silent dances.

  İrfan opened his medicine cabinet and picked out a bottle of Stilnox from among the countless medicines there. It would help him sleep for a while, at least. He was shaken by a storm of tears, worse even than before. Fortunately, Aysel was not awake to witness this crisis. It would have been impossible for him to have explained a fear he himself did not understand.

  Was he really unable to comprehend its reason? Didn’t he know the cause? “Don’t lie to yourself,” he advised.

  Aysel would certainly have suggested a practical solution: Go to a psychiatrist. “Get professional advice, you’ll feel much better. That’s their job, after all.” These and other clichés of the same sort were the advice she would give.

  But İrfan already knew what conclusions the psychiatrist would come to.

  The professor’s hopelessness did not stem from being unaware of his problem, but because he knew exactly what it was. He had struggled to understand his situation, finally grasping it fully after reading a book with the title of Sleeping Endymion. In classical Greek mythology, a young shepherd boy, Endymion, incurs the wrath of the gods by falling in love with a goddess, and the gods sentence him by making him decide on his own destiny. Unable to bear this punishment, he chooses to remain forever young, but forever asleep till the end of time.

  When he read this, İrfan realized that he, too, like Endymion, was terrified of perceiving his own fate. One’s fate should always remain a secret. No mortal is strong enough to know exactly what life holds, when an accident will occur, or in what guise death will arrive.

  This idea had completely upset İrfan’s ideas about all the things he had regarded as secure in life, which now became ropes to strangle him. He knew he would go on living in the same house, watch television from the same chair, eat at the same restaurants, meet the same people, say the same words … until one day, an ambulance would rush him through the streets he walked down every day to the same hospital he always went to, and there he would die. Or maybe, without being given time to reach the hospital, he would collapse, lifeless, on the Dunlopillo bed or one of the Ligne Roset armchairs. Those pieces of furniture he and Aysel had so happily picked out together were no longer objects of comfort or joy but appeared to him like makeshift coffins. He loved Aysel. That was not his problem, yet he could not endure the image of life as inevitably the same.

  During a conference in Paris, he had met a Canadian professor, a woman who had introduced him to the concept of metanoia, which had become a beacon in his mind in the same way that a lighthouse gives hope to the sea-tossed mariner. At the core of metanoia, which means “to transcend or exceed one’s self and be transported into another existence,” is the notion of “self.”

  It was the concept of self, in any case, which was the problem. What did “me,” “myself,” “I” really mean? To repeat one’s own name over and over is enough to feel separated from self. But how could one not become a stranger to the “self” one carried with one from birth to death, nor alienated from the “id”?

  The more the professor considered this question, the more deeply he recognized that most people do live with this alienation in every possible sense of the word. It is the rules of society and the material world that protect us from becoming estranged. Whenever we go astray, we sink back into the warm, relaxing waters of habit. After all, our guide is the familiar comfort of the armchair in which we always sit, the faucet we can turn on even with our eyes shut, and the imprint of our head on the pillow on waking up. In this sense, human beings are like dogs that urinate on trees, marking their territory in order to feel safe within the secure boundaries of their own smell. For human beings, familiar sensations and belongings constituted the formula for contentment.

  The great Russian author Dostoevsky described his return to Russia from Europe by saying, “It’s just like putting on your old pantofles.” Sliding your feet into your old bedroom slippers—that was a good definition. That was the way people lived their lives. If they were not safe within their own familiar world, they would probably feel like a boy who was raised in a cellar, then cast out into the public square. But İrfan yearned to surmount the restrictive, tiresome security of his life, which, disguised as happiness, threatened to overwhelm him. To do this he needed to change. A personal metanoia should be experienced at least once in a lifetime.

  The Stilnox had started to take effect. İrfan’s eyelids had begun to droop, and his mind was becoming cloudy. In the dimly lit bedroom, Aysel slept silently as usual, like a corpse, one leg released from its coverings.

  The professor returned quietly to bed and laid his head to rest on the pillow. His last vision before falling asleep was of two young men and a boundless expanse of ocean. While he stood there on the shore, on the horizon was the slowly fading silhouette of the boat carrying his friend Hidayet to Alexandria to explore the poet Cavafy’s city.

  “Had Hidayet reached his goal?” he wondered. Maybe he had stopped off somewhere along the way and settled down to a different way of life. Or perhaps the waves whipped up by the adverse winds of Zeus had engulfed his tiny boat.

  “Good-bye, Hidayet,” İrfan murmured. And he dozed off into a troubled sleep, still unable to escape the fear of advancing toward death, of being aware of his destiny.

  INNOCENT BRIDE, BEAUTIFUL BRIDE

  Nine hundred miles east of Istanbul, and seventy miles beyond Meryem’s village, Cemal woke up trembling with excitement in his bunk at the outpost on the snow-covered slopes of the Gabar Mountains.

  He had been dreaming again of the innocent bride, whose legend had been passed down in his village for generations. In his dream, the pure young woman had glanced at the forbidden part of his body. Then Cemal exposed his private parts to her, opening his body to the delicate touch of her hands as her eyes grew wide in wonder.

  Although the identity of the innocent bride was unknown, the young men of the village never ceased to talk about her—endlessly repeating to each other the same titillating story.

  Once, long ago, a young girl had grown up to the age of fifteen sheltered from all evil and raised like a precious flower in the seclusion of her home, ignorant of the world outside. Her parents did not let her play with other children, shielding her from knowledge of the shameful things that could happen between girls and boys.

  The year she turned fifteen, the girl was married off to Hasan the shepherd, who prized his bride’s naïve innocence and was determined to preserve it. On their wedding night, he said, “I’m going to tell you a secret, my virtuous bride. I’m different from other men.”

  The innocent girl looked expectantly at her husband.

  “I have something they don’t have,” he said as he revealed himself to her.

  “Oh my goodness,” she gasped. “Whatever is that?”

  “I’ll show you what it’s good for,” Hasan said and proceeded to demonstrate all the skills of his secret until dawn and prove to his wife that he was indeed different from any other man in the world. From that day on his wife wore an enigmatic smile. She did not share her man’s secret with anyone, but, in front of others, only lowered her gaze in a knowing, half-mocking way.

  Several years later, Hasan had to report for his military service. Before leaving home for this two-year separation, he hugged
his wife and told her they would carry on from where they had left off when he returned. “Just wait patiently for that time to come,” he said. After he was gone, the young woman’s face lost its smile and her eyes were full of yearning. “What’s the matter?” people would ask. “Nothing,” she would answer. “It’s just that I miss Hasan.”

  One afternoon, as she was wandering aimlessly around, she was approached by her husband’s best friend, Mehmet.

  “Why are you so glum?” he asked. “You’re not the only woman whose man has gone to serve in the army.”

  “But he’s not like other men.” She sighed.

  When Mehmet inquired what was so different about Hasan, she answered, “He has something in front of him that no other man possesses.”

  Realizing his friend’s shrewdness, Mehmet grinned. “I have something similar,” he whispered.

  Hasan’s wife did not believe him and thought he was telling her a lie. Mehmet took her to a deserted field, where he was able to prove the truth of his words. From that day on, he was able to prove it again and again on the many occasions he and the innocent bride met secretly at night.

  Time passed quickly, and Hasan returned to the village. To his surprise, his wife greeted him with a tart look on her face instead of a smile. When he questioned her, she cried out, “You’re a liar! You told me that you were the only one who had that strange part in front of him.”

  “My God,” Hasan thought to himself. “I’ve lost my innocent bride!”

  He then asked her who else had this strange thing, and she told him about Mehmet.

  Feeling desperate and not knowing what he could do, Hasan had recourse to another lie. “I used to have two of them, so I gave one to Mehmet.”

  Upon hearing this, his wife burst into a storm of sobs and weeping. “What’s the matter?” Hasan inquired. “Why are you crying?” The innocent bride punched Hasan in the stomach as she wailed sadly, “Why did you give him the better one?”